"10 Cloverfield Lane" Opens Big in North America with $25.2-M

Paramount Pictures' and Bad Robot's new mystery thriller “10 Cloverfield Lane” connected with American audiences in its opening weekend March 11 to 13, earning a whopping $25.2 million from 3,391 locations.

Watch a new spot of “10 Cloverfield Lane” below:

That’s a strong debut considering that the film about a woman (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) who finds herself trapped in a doomsday bunker, waiting out the apocalypse with the neighborhood survivalists (John Goodman, John Gallagher Jr.), cost only $13 million to produce.

Paramount vice chairman Rob Moore credited Bad Robot chief J.J. Abrams with coming up with the concept for the twisty thriller while he was in production on “Star Wars: The Force Awakens.” He said the key was to make sure that none of the advertisements revealed any of the film’s surprises.

“We wanted to give people just enough clues to keep them excited, interested, and wanting more,” said Moore. “That’s rare in this day and age, when so much [information] is given out so early.”

“10 Cloverfield Lane” also benefitted from positive word-of-mouth and rave reviews, averaging a high 90% score in reviews-aggregator site, Rotten Tomatoes. The critics' consenses was: “Smart, solidly crafted, and palpably tense, `10 Cloverfield Lane' makes the most of its confined setting and outstanding cast -- and suggests a new frontier for franchise filmmaking.”

Described as a “blood relative” to the 2007 smash hit “Cloverfield,” the new film stars John Goodman, Mary Elizabeth Winstead and John Gallagher, Jr. So far, the official synopsis only reads, “Monsters come in many forms.”